The invention relates to a tape printing apparatus for printing alphanumeric and symbolic characters on a tape as a printing medium, and particularly to a tape printing apparatus having an improved print image display function.
The applicant of the invention has developed a tape printing apparatus having a keyboard, display screen and print mechanism for printing alphanumeric and symbolic characters on tapes having widths of, for example of 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 mm, for making spine labels for files or the like, and proposed various editing functions be provided for the tape printing apparatus, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,117,719 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,314,256 (European Unexamined Patent Publication No. 0534794 A2), the disclosures of which are herein incorporated by reference.
The above-mentioned tape printing apparatus can deal with various tape widths by the use of exchangeable tape cassettes and characters are printed in sizes which are appropriate to the tape widths.
Conventional tape printing apparatuses are designed to display a print image of characters in a size which is set regardless of the tape width. Therefore it is difficult for the user to anticipate the print result of the tape based on the displayed print image.
A conceivable manner of overcoming this problem is to display a print range with border lines indicative of the tape width. However, such lines will not clearly indicate the tape width and will mix with entered characters such as frame line segments if the line type is fixed to a solid line, dashed line or dash-dot line for example.